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Stanford researchers said this week they had used a supercomputer with more than one million computing cores to predict the noise generated by a supersonic jet engine.

The researchers used the 1,572,864 processor Sequoia IBM Bluegene/Q system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories to run complex simulations that determined the physics of noise that are often impossible in the harsh exhaust environment of massive and powerful jet engines.

"The exhausts of high-performance aircraft at takeoff and landing are among the most powerful human-made sources of noise. For ground crews, even for those wearing the most advanced hearing protection available, this creates an acoustically hazardous environment. To the communities surrounding airports, such noise is a major annoyance and a drag on property values. Understandably, engineers are keen to design new and better aircraft engines that are quieter than their predecessors. New nozzle shapes, for instance, can reduce jet noise at its source, resulting in quieter aircraft," Stanford stated.

The researchers noted that with the advent of massive supercomputers boasting hundreds of thousands of computing cores, engineers been able to model jet engines and the noise they produce with accuracy and speed. Such fluid dynamics simulations test all aspects of a supercomputer. The waves propagating throughout the simulation require a carefully orchestrated balance between computation, memory and communication. Supercomputers like Sequoia divvy up the complex math into smaller parts so they can be computed simultaneously. The more cores you have, the faster and more complex the calculations can be, the researchers said.

"And yet, despite the additional computing horsepower, the difficulty of the calculations only becomes more challenging with more cores. At the one-million-core level, previously innocuous parts of the computer code can suddenly become bottlenecks," the researchers stated.

Cooney is an Online News Editor and the author of the Layer 8 blog, Network World's daily home for the not-just-networking news. He has been working with Network World since 1992. You can reach him at mcooney@nww.com.